Tag: Trump's minions

The light side v the dark side – from a google image search – DIY Website Tool

Take Down Trump, Then Tackle the Republicans

We are all adults here. We know that good and evil are never completely separate from each other. We also know that we have the potential for both good and evil within us. We also are aware that for whatever reasons (nature or nurture) there are people who do not seem able to tell good and evil apart, people who cannot suppress harmful impulses, people who make bad choices, and people who go down bad pathways.

We don’t expect that people will wear white hats or black hats so we can tell who might harm us. We know there may be a side that heeds the “light” and a “dark side,” but most of us have access to both kinds of impulses. We try to cut people some slack if we find that they are starting to act out of character, or when an aspect of their character seems to turn more dark than light. (I’m using this tired Star Wars analogy because it is a shared cultural meme.)

In politics this knowledge that we all contain both good and evil is the philosophy behind both-sides-ism. This is the basis of the statement that, “The Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans.” Well when it comes to corruption and money this might be true. There are just as many Democrats who seem to come away from Washington rich as there are

Republicans. At least conventional wisdom says this is so.

But when it comes to governance, and the agenda each side has for the America people, it has become clear that Democrats are moving to the “light” side and Republicans have chosen to champion the “dark side”. Democrats have passed a number of bills addressing issues the American people care about: gun control legislation, drug price controls, LGBTQ rights, paycheck fairness guarantees, a bill to secure elections and make it easier for people to vote, a bill to protect immigrant children born in America (dreamers), a Climate Action Now bill, a bill to restore the Violence Against Women Act, and a Save the Internet Act.

All these bills are sitting in the Senate because Mitch McConnell will not bring them to the floor for a vote and if he did bring them to the floor they would be voted down. But why? Each one of these bills secures a right for some or all American people. There is not one thing contained in these bills that should be considered injurious or that would have a negative effect on America or the American people. Even the most controversial bills protect rights for a segment of America.

Why is it that Republicans can get away with acting as if being born as an LGBTQ individual is a sin that will rub off on anyone of faith who gets near a same-sex couple or doesn’t try conversion therapy on a perhaps already-‘gobsmacked’ teen. In fact why should it be traumatic at all to find out about your sexual preferences? Why would a person of faith assume that it is fine, in fact required by God, to treat any person in this group as unacceptable, or even criminal?

For over two centuries people who were stolen from their homes and sold in America as slaves have been considered by “religious” Americans as less-than-human even as they fathered children by indiscriminately forcing enslaved women to lie with them and they could see that procreation was possible (thus proving the humanity of dark-skinned folks).

Haven’t we already been through this with people who claim that they believe these things because they are conservative when the rest of us can see that they are really just intolerant or bigoted patterns of behavior. People who identify as right-wingers want us to believe that immigrants are also subhuman. While there might be valid reasons that a nation cannot allow itself to be overrun with too many migrant people at one time, and while it may be true that some migrant people could be nursing hate for the land they want to enter, pretending that people are not human enough to live among us takes the fear just a bit too far. It takes it into the “dark side”. It appears that migrations will increase worldwide so it would seem better for the world’s nations to make a plan to make the upheaval of settled populations less unsettling.

Holding Back the Future = from a Google image search – Hulen Street Church

It gets tiresome to keep tolerating hate and fear. It prevents a nation from looking to the future and coming up with reasonable ways to solve problems that are trending in the world at a particular time (such as migration due to climate change). These supposedly conservative, republican people are letting themselves be taken over by the “dark side” and there is no rational purpose for sympathizing with them except that they tend to get scary when challenged. They are wrong-headed and we know that they are holding us all back.

For some reason the entire Republican Party has gone over to the “dark side.” They insist that they are saving a nation that they are actually killing. Even before Trump was elected in 2016, Republicans wanted things that helped the Party and the wealthy far more than the people they promised to serve. Elite Republicans in the Senate could never have inspired the Tea Party. Talk Radio and Fox News did that. And they were the warm-up act for Trump.

Why would ordinary Americans, either urban or rural, care about tax cuts that only benefited the wealthiest Americans and corporations. These folks were sold a bill of goods; the trickle-down bill of goods. The Republicans at the base of the party were promised their factories back, which the Republican Party had to know was a lie. Republicans have experts to advise them on economics. The Republicans stick to trickle-down because the money trickles into their own bank accounts and stock portfolios.

Why would average Americans care about state’s rights? I doubt if many people who work every day have spent a lot of time thinking about what the US would be like if the state’s individually had more power than the federal government. Chaos is not conducive to peaceful productive lives, nor does it make America a great place to raise your children. If every individual state made its own laws things would begin to feel complicated.

Why would people who live in states that are destroyed time and again by ever fiercer storms like to see rules passed to stop protecting people from toxic environmental anomalies? We see the tracks of people’s grief, homes turned to splinters. The only reason I can think of is that these folks have been convinced by media that our factories left because those awful Democrats forced them to follow environmental rules. That may have been part of why factories left but cheap labor and new markets were the real temptations to stray.

Why would people fight against the Medicaid expansion that Obama offered and cheer on their red state when it turned the federal money down? These were people without jobs at the time. They needed health care. Why did they vote against their own interests? Tradition? Brainwashing? The fear of creeping socialism planted in their brains by the instruments of propaganda.

It is called budgeting when the American people decide how they want to spend their tax dollars. If they want to spend on programs that help parents who work, help people afford good health care and meds, help turn out productive young people by subsidizing the cost of good post-high school training or education, on updating infrastructure, that is the people’s business. It is not socialism.

Republicans were already going about the business of dismantling bipartisan government and remaking it in the image that was hammered out in meetings between Conservatives, corporate heavies like the Koch’s and Evangelicals. How many people cared about whether Creationism should be taught in schools before these right-wing believers convinced them that this is not a nation that guarantees religious freedom to all; this is a Christian nation they say, and Christians believe in creationism, not evolution. It is so hard to argue that Christians have gone over to the “dark side” but they have. It is no longer easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven. Now if you are wealthy you are chosen by God and he proved it by making you rich. That’s not in the Bible I read, however.

If the Republican Party has gone to the “dark side” then Trump is their perfect minion, although now transformed into their “anything-can-happen” boss. He is not even Darth Vader, because Vader still had some light in him. He is Supreme Leader Snoke, that man so evil that he did not realize how ugly he had become. Take heart. Although Snoke did have power, he was not quite as invincible as he believed himself to be .

Trump also has a very weird effect on people. He can turn them into absolute loyalists who scurry to do his bidding even though this corruption could destroy our American dream. Toadyism turns our government representatives, who pledged an oath to uphold the documents that make our country a republic, into something too terrible to contemplate, something we have spent 240 years trying to stave off.

Even if we get rid of Trump as we need to do, we are left with the shameless and lawless Republican Party. I cannot believe that people still interview Republicans and pretend that Democrats are deliberately refusing to be bipartisan when it is totally the other way around. Republicans no longer have a bipartisan bone in their bodies. The only reason I can see for them to behave as they do is because of their ‘Grand Plan’ to take over our government and remake it according to reactionary right-wing visions; to keep our country tied to fossil fuels even if it kills our economy and our planet; and to never again have to listen to a “liberal” idea.

Unless the Republican Party gives up its not-so-shadowy takeover agenda and turns back into a party that helps steer us and keep us somewhat fiscally cautious as we move forward, either the Republican Party will die or the Grand American experiment will. Under the ‘Republican Plan’ we will all become ‘sad’ little subjects of some leader’s capricious whims for many, many ‘sad’ years.

No amount of power, no amount of stockpiled money will suffice to assure that you can keep the future at bay through stubborn will. Despite many flaws recounted in the news every day (we all have flaws) we need to let Democrats lead for enough years to guide us smoothly into what promises to be an increasingly global future as leaders of a nation involved in determining what that future will look like.